ILX BOOKS OF THE 00s: THE RESULTS! (or: Ismael compiles his reading list, 2010-2019)

Yeah, I love that quote, delighted to get the chance to employ it here.

http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/en/e/e9/Am1logo.jpg

I also like this graphic.

I definitely thank that's the point of Blood Meridian - I'm just not sure I like the point. But I did settle into the rhythm of it and loved the second half. The more Judge the better, basically.

Plot's not up there with the American Pastoral/Human Stain/Communist trilogy but it's a great change of pace from the old-man-losing-his-sexual-potency vein that he's been mining recently, and the one that I find it easiest to recommend to people. Its strengths don't rely on you being a Roth fan already.

I read that Ashton Kutcher is being talked about as the Judge in the proposed movie, btw- that may have been an ILX only wind up but dear god.

It's a time since I read The Plot Against America, but I remember it almost like a children's book now. I don't know if it's just because the narrator's young, or whether it actually would be a fabulous thing to discover aged 13 or 14.

darraghmac sorta makes Blood Meridian sound like some kind of po-mo steez about the impossibility of achieving narrative closure, especially in an adventure story where 'excitement' and 'action' are basically synonyms for violent transgression and near-misses with death.

but I think that would be a better book than the one that I read.

found a comment I wrote shortly after I read it, where I complain about "prose that bypasses the mind and permits nothing more than a gut reaction (dread, fear, disgust, awe, wonder)"; I think I'd still agree with that. it's like "show, don't tell" taken to an absurd extreme.

it's like "show, don't tell" taken to an absurd extreme

show, don't tell, and if you can rub their noses in the rotting flesh and faeces then so much the better would maybe be even more accurate.

I felt that McCarthy had finally found his subject with The Road. If you like writing about blasted wastelands where the only morality is kill or be killed, don't fuck about with the real America - go post-apocalyptic.

xpost: which, I mean... maybe that would be effective if I had a romanticized/whitewashed notion of American history that I had tried to keep free of such 'unpleasantness' and McCarthy was totally exploding my perceptions, but since I don't, it just comes across (to me) as fetishizing the obviously-bad

mccarthy is a pretty good antidote to the self-help/positivity vibe of the past decade tbh, now that we're in a good worldwide recession i don't think i need to read him so much anymore.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THAT, let's talk about the 00s! Kafka on the Shore, really? I only got about halfway through that one... it was no Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that's fershur

can i just

Just want to be in first with the McCARTHY OUT
― Suggest Bandage (Noodle Vague), Saturday, February 7, 2009 4:59 PM

loooooooooooooooooool

I don't know what that meanz

2. The Human Stain - Philip Roth (2000)
(152 points, seven votes, one first-placed vote)

http://www.longpauses.com/blog/01_18_06.jpg

Red Raymaker:
This book was the best book I've read which has been published since 2000. It comes close behind my favourite books of any decade which are Updike's four main "Rabbit" books. I also think that "The Human Stain" is the best book Roth has written. I love the way he combines writing about sex, love, race, belonging, aging, prejudice, fear and redemption within the same unified story. He covers such a broad range of subjects which are at the core of the human experience but fits it in to the story. It reads very easily and he writes intelligently and imaginatively without seeming to be pompous or trying to show off; I find that I can get distracted when reading Rusdhie by his tendency to show off, even though I recognise that Rushdie can be a terrific writer too.

Ismael Klata:
A perfect novel. If I hadn't read 'American Pastoral' this might've been my no.1. I liked it because it works its subject so hard, in so many ways and with so many twists. It was the first Roth I read and a terrific choice, very adult and about real stuff. I read it after seeing an article using him to draw unfavourable conclusions about modern British fiction. It was immediately obvious what it meant - every other 'serious' book I'd read looked like it was just playing in comparison.

Ask me about the work of Philip Roth

The second best book on the pyschic unravelling of a human who we think is perfect . A Jewish Gatsby with all of the prestige and none of the money. A catalogue of how messy sexuailty is
― anthony, Saturday, July 21, 2001 12:00 AM (8 years ago)

Philip Roth bijvoorbeeld. I Married A Communist vond ik geweldig. Heb daarom meteen meer gekocht/geleend, maar dat was allemaal toch vooral hard werken.
zijn romans American Pastoral en The Human Stain lezen niet voor de volle lengte echt lekker weg, terwijl Sabbath's Theater juist weer om te smullen is. De belevenissen van de perverse oude vieze man Mickey Sabbath zijn hilarisch pijnlijk.
― Vido Liber (Vido), Friday, January 31, 2003 12:38 PM (7 years ago)

I read The Human Stain and didn't particularly like it - in that novel, at least, he couldn't characterise women for shit, and it all seemed a bit, well, whiny. Is THS particularly representative of hiw writing as a whole? I really like the idea of The Counterlife, but if it's written in the same style as THS I know I'll dislike it.
― cis (cis), Wednesday, December 24, 2003 11:43 AM (6 years ago)

I had a long and frustrating conversation with someone wherein I was pointing out, with amazement, that the title of Philip Roth's The Human Stain could be read in two different ways, and that ads for the film version seemed to be inflecting it in the one of those two ways that I hadn’t thought of. Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to make the different inflections clear to the person I was talking to. I’ll try it with you guys: I had always read the title (without having read the book) as being “The Human Stain” like “The Human Condition”; the film trailer suddenly made me realize it was possibly supposed to be “The Human Stain” like “The Human Cannonball” or “The Human Calculator,” referring to the individual character.
I share this only because I need some reassurance that I wasn't being a bonehead in this conversation.
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, December 1, 2004 7:40 PM (5 years ago)

I've had a hard time getting into a lot of Roth's books, but then all of a sudden 'The Plot Against America' and 'The Human Stain' floored me. I just loved the overall structure of both of them, the unpredictability page by page, the giant changes that characters make in their lives (in completely credible ways), etc.
― Eazy (Eazy), Thursday, October 13, 2005 1:28 PM (4 years ago)

Dear Philip Roth,
What is up with the awful crow metaphor/symbolism in The Human Stain? You are a much better writer than this.
Sadly,
― Mr. Que, Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:42 PM (2 years ago)

The Human Stain is still probably the most satisfying novel I've read this decade.
― Eazy, Friday, May 4, 2007 4:19 AM (2 years ago)

The Human Stain was sort of like watching an expert marksmen at a carnival shooting gallery; sure dude hit all the targets but the effect was still slightly ridiculous.
― Lamp, Thursday, June 19, 2008 3:28 AM (1 year ago)

i'm not sure if i like it. i feel like i'm not old enough to read it.
― steamed hams (harbl), Tuesday, September 29, 2009 12:41 PM (4 months ago)

I guess I am going to have to check out Roth?

nicole kidman can be so pretty when she isn't nicole kidman

not what I expected at all, had no idea people liked this one so much. I'm sort of with Lamp overall.

Blimey

I guess I am going to have to check out Roth?

― 80085 (a hoy hoy), Tuesday, February 16, 2010 5:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark
^^^^^^^^

I know my gf owns The Counterlife; is that a good one to start with?

sorry, I didn't mean to sound like I don't like this book, I do! I just didn't expect so much Roth love so near the top.

I think this one is damaged by a too-great interest in the super-boring topic of "political correctness" though.

The Counterlife is quite difficult. I read it recently (I think it's the eleventh of his I've read) and I felt it was a bit meta for me even though it's by no means his most meta (though I'm not a fan of meta full stop). I started with The Human Stain then went back to Portnoy's Complaint - both of those are good starting points. The Plot Against America might be the best one to kick off with, it's probably the most straightforward.

I got the Roth/Kidman photo from this article comparing film and book. I haven't seen the film, but I thought the article was really insightful in terms of showing how what works in one doesn't necessarily translate to the other.

the human stain is worse for being a "good book" imo - something in really rebelled against how 'well-crafted' it is

Well, I think the time has come for your number one...

*drumroll*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTo6-Tx7uOU

1. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen (2001)
(205 points, eleven votes, two first-placed votes)

http://www.themillions.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/franzenbig1.jpg

eephus!:
A big family novel with simple, conventional virtues -- good sentences, good jokes, good story. M Chabon, J Franzen, J Lethem have similar sentence-by-sentence approaches to writing novels; heavy on the wit, heavy on the unexpected adjective, lots of weight placed on dialogue which is (in the world of the novel) is off-hand. Each of the three starts out as a young hotshot in the 90s and comes out with a "big book" this decade (Kavalier and Clay, Motherless Brooklyn -- ok, fall 99 but who's counting --and The Corrections.) But I think the Chabon and Lethem books are in some ways a step back from what they were doing before, a retreat into something easier. While Franzen (who to be fair had done way less than MC and JL prior to the big book) seemed more to have his best material ready for the big stage.

TimF:
I love this novel and I love its structure: burrowing into the minds of each member of a family in turn allows you to absorb each one's prejudices and assumptions re the others only to have them undermined later on; but each character is better and worse than they are imagined to be their siblings. I've heard it described as moralizing but I found the writing to be very tender; Franzen loves his characters for their faults more than anything else.

Moreno:
A family meltdown novel done right. Great book but the movie's gonna suck.

The Corrections
Did anyone else actually get through The Corrections?

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Corrections after having read many conflicting reviews about the story. But I was rather entranced with the story - the familial conversations were painfully real, to me - and maybe that is why I felt so mcuh empathy for the mother. I didn't really care for any of the characters - they were almost *too* human in their imperfections, but I could well see where they were coming from and why.
There were some times when I was conscious of the author's voice coming through the words, and sounding self-satisfied - like "Hey, aren't I brilliant?" but for the most part I was able to lose myself within the story and was not conscious of the writer's ego poking through. I don't think that the writing, itself, was anything miraculous, but I do think it fit well with the story that was being told.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Monday, May 19, 2003 12:52 AM (6 years ago)

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It took a while to get up much enthusiasm because it's quite a dull opening - a rather unattractive old couple moaning about old people things - but the rest of the family appear soon enough and I'm drawn right in.
I've had a good run of books set on fault lines of generational, ideological or ethnic divides - how dull, initially, the Midwest seems in comparison! Had I not been softened up by Updike I'm not sure I'd've got over the hump, but it's been worth it. The human conflicts are still there, you just have to burrow deeper to find them.
...
I finished 'The Corrections' last night. It was really good, had me hooked like few books have in the last year or two. I was really looking forward to every opportunity to escape into that world, which was even more impressive because most of it was so ordinary. It didn't even need the Lithuanian bits, I don't think, Denise's story would have carried the action on its own.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 5:05 PM (5 months ago)

m.e.a. (m.e.a.) wrote this on thread Incongruously Placed Advertising, S&D on board I Love Everything on Apr 30, 2004:
The tire shop near my apartment has a billboard above it...for a different tire shop. And I'm always amused by the corrections page in Slate, which always features an ad for Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

xxxxxp,
read a roth interview online recently (from gq maybe) where he was lamenting the film of the human stain, and despairing because the same people had the rights to american pastoral

big meh on this top five for sure. what a whimper.

i kinda liked St. Jude (?) and its denizens in The Corrections, cause it reminded me of home, but just about everything else in that book rubbed me the wrong way.

what a bore of a book.

couldn't disagree more, didn't read #5 but wholeheartedly endorse #4-1

thanks, ismael, this was tremendous!

great book! the characterisation is amazing.

So Everything Is Illuminated didn't even place.

i've been trying to decide whether i was interested in reading The Corrections for a while now, i suppose this is enough of a recommendation to give it a go.

an interesting tribute to DFW by Jonathan Franzen here: http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no10.pdf

Good result. I know there's a Franzen backlash elsewhere on ILX, on one thread because he had the audacity to take the piss out of late Gaddis, but I like his ambition - "DeLillo with characters you care about" was how he put it iirc (I paraphrase). Strong Motion and the 27th City are good too - less covincing, and more obviously in DeLillo's shadow, but full of ideas and I loved seeing him get (pretty much) everything right on his third attempt. One thing that surprised me about The Corrections was how funny it was - not self-consciously zany, but genuinely witty, especially in the setpieces - the mixed grill sequence springs to mind.

Thanks Ismael - this was fun.

Ah, slight error on my part over Everything Is Illuminated - I inadvertently gave it two slots on my list, both of which fell outside the top 100. It would've placed, but only at joint no.55 or so with Perdido Street Station. I made a similar mistake with Harry Potter but picked that up in time. I don't think there were any others *fingers crossed*

"the mixed grill sequence springs to mind."

absolutely. gary with the bread bag round his cut hand sneaking off to drink vodka while his son spied on him with a surveillance camera. classic.

that the upper reaches of this list are mostly books I own but haven't read yet (except The Road, which I've read, and it was... good! Certainly compelling and well-written, but something about the style and tone I just couldn't completely immerse myself in) suggests I have good times ahead. A shame that Everything is Illuminated wasn't #1, we would've had some of that much desired bile at last. That book I liked, although have the same irritations that everyone else has.

thanks a bunch Ismael, I've enjoyed this a lot.

Thanks Ismael.

Yeah, thanks a bunch.

cheers Ismael

yah thanks!

fwiw i have ~bad things to say~ abt the corrections but cannot order my thought @ the moment. my ballot:

01 alice munro - runaway (2005)
02 roberto bolaño - savage detectives (2007)
03 andre aciman - call me by your name (2007)
04 steven erikson - memories of ice (2005)
05 gary shteyngart - russian debutante’s handbook (2003)
06 james elroy - cold six thousand (2001)
07 george rr martin - storm of swords (2000)
08 mircea cărtărescu - nostalgia (2005)
09 shannon burke - black flies (2008)
10 alice munro - hateship, friendship, loveship, courtship, marriage (2001)
11 amy hempel - collected stories (2006)
12 roberto bolaño - 2666 (2008)
13 david foster wallace - oblivion (2004)
14 mary gaitskill - veronica (2005)
15 alan hollinghurst - the line of beauty (2004)
16 china miéville - perdido street station (2000)
17 robert bingham - lightning on the sun (2000)
18 joseph o'neil - netherland (2008)
19 rivka galchen - atmospheric disturbances (2008)
20 adam haslett - you are not a stranger here (2002)

i bought the aciman on yr recommendation, lamp (i already mentioned this upthread but i'm not sure if you caught it).

Thanks Ismael, sterling work! Don't really care about roth tbh, might give the frantzen a go.

xp: no i hadnt! hoped u like it

kind of lol 2 me: the entire top ten was dudes :/

On that note, I'm surprised Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children didn't make an appearance.